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Life Can be Murder in High Heels – Fetishising of Clothing

High Heels

A fetish fascination, sexist slavery, health hazard, or neo-feminist fashion choice? Are heels demeaning, empowering, fetishising? Should dress codes include height of footwear rules, or just stick with professional, casual, formal etc? Why are high heels such a simultaneous symbol of oppression, femininity, power and domination?

Nicola Thorp, 27, arrived on her first day at PwC in December in flat shoes but says she was told she had to wear shoes with a “2in to 4in heel”. When she said the demand was discriminatory she was sent home without pay after refusing to go out and buy a pair of heels. (The Guardian)

Does a gendered dress code still exist?

If dress codes were agender and uniform, how would that affect trans people? It’s often been suggested that if a future world were less sexist, binary and clothes were not considered gendered, how would trans people express themselves, or “pass”?

Does the wearing of high heels reinforce a gendered hierarchical oppression or can they be reclaimed?

Can high heels be reclaimed as empowerment not oppression?

Almodovar “Life can be murder in high heels”

“I love wearing high heels. I am a cis, mostly hetero feminist woman, and I love this dated, potentially oppressive symbol of heteronormative traditional femininity. Because I like performing femininity (glitter, lipstick, and high, high heels). As a feminist and a student of Women and Gender Studies, I often pondered why painful footwear (and the more painful, the better) should hold me in its thrall.” – Everyday Feminism

“Some say high-heeled look reduces women to sex objects. It’s time to change the old-fashioned view and reclaim it as a symbol of empowerment.” – megarip

Equivalent? What would that look like in reality if applied in the workplace or tested legally? Men in ballet pumps, cramping their feet and allowing them to stand en pointe to reach the tallest shelves at work? No baggy suits, only tailored ones to every pectoral muscle, firm behind or indeed bulge, looking like someone from the Chippendales before the striptease music begins? Perhaps, the phraseology should be an “equivalent level of sexualisation”.http://www.katyjon.com/state-sanctioned-sexism-murder-in-high-heels-to-continue/